Other formatting options
To complete formatting options of your documentation, you can use a custom formatted text that will be displayed on top and bottom of each documentation page. You can also use one or more of the predefined tags as the screenshot shows.
So, now I’m actually through with my description of some of the manifold settings of ApexSQL Doc. I’d like to show you now, what it all was about and how the final result looks like. The tool supports HTML, CHM and HXS (Compiled Help File Format HTML 2.0) as output format. Note, that for using the HXS format, you need to download the compiler separately. It is not included with the tool. That is also the reason why I’ve “borrowed” the HXS screenshots from the ApexSQL Doc online help.
If you are using Visual Studio 2003 you can get the compiler from here. For Visual Studio 2005 the Help compiler has been integrated into the Visual Studio 2005 SDK which you can download from here. But you might want to check the Visual Studio 2005 Extensibility Center for the lastest version of the SDK. As far as I know, you cannot install the VS 2003 compiler after you’ve installed Visual Studio 2005.
So, a click on the “Finish” button in the Main Application Window tells ApexSQL Doc to go to work. Depending on the settings you’ve chosen, this might take some time…
The final documentation
The documentations main HTML screen looks like this:
From there you can navigate and surf to all items of interest, such as tables:
and have a look at how the documentation of a table looks like.
Quite interesting is the “Dictionary” function of the documentation. It allows you to quickly locate all the places where a certain object is used:
In my case, I wanted to see where the column “Num” is used.